Registration is now open for the 4th Biennial John Updike Society Conference October 12-15, 2016, celebrating manuscripts, research, and special collections and hosted by the University of South Carolina Libraries in Columbia, S.C. It will be the first chance that society members have to see the Don and Ellen Greiner Updike Collection. Greiner is serving as conference director, and the conference hotel is The Inn at USC Wyndham Garden, right on USC’s campus.

Tour of Civil War sites like the State House (pictured above) and the USC “Horseshoe,” which Gen. Sherman spared on his march through the South because the campus buildings were being used as a hospital for both sides; the South Caroliniana Library (pictured below), on the Horseshoe, was built in 1840 and was the first freestanding college library in the nation

Though attendees must be members of the society, all are welcome to join and experience this celebration of manuscripts, research, and special collections, with a focus on John Updike. Click on the link below to download a draft of the program and all registration and hotel information:

The authors note that “determined as John Updike was to write himself into immortality to the greatest extent possible, he was noticeably less determined, especially in his later years, to render himself his own subject matter. He explains his reticence in Self-Consciousness (1989): ‘The fabricated truth of poetry and fiction makes a shelter in which I feel safe, sheltered within interlaced plausibilities in the image of a real world for which I am not to blame.'”

“When he does yield, overtly, to the personal essay form,” the authors conclude, “his writing tends to have a texture more revelatory than divulging. He will tell us how he feels about his childhood, his adolescence, his young adulthood, his more recent past and his present, but he is not drawn to gross self-exposure. He does not veer toward the taboo or to the explication of intense inner pain, as so-called confessional writers often do. Nor does he appear to be seeking empathy or absolution. Instead, he gazes calmly upon his own life and articulates what he sees in terms as neutral and exacting as words will allow. . . . Instead, what Updike as essayist seems most preoccupied with is a kind of public self-construction, an identity of record.”

Blogger Lori Carlson has challenged herself to post entries from “A to Z” and her entry for “U” is “John Updike Inspires Me.” On her blog, As the Fates Would Have It, she writes that she was told not to read Updike when she was 13 but did so anyway.

“His Rabbit series was my first taste of his writing, which I continued to read up until the last one was published in 1990. I also read The Witches of Eastwick around 1984 and The Widows of Eastwick in 2008. Over the years, I have probably devoured around 15 of his novels, two of his poetry books and even a few of his non-fiction works. What inspires me the most about Updike’s writing is that he speaks to the everyman with his topics of morality, mortality, religion, death and sex. And as my old high school English teacher would say, he ‘knows how to use his words.'”

Writing for the L.A. Review of Books, writer Meghan O’Gieblyn confesses, “Like so many women who came of age after the turn of the millennium, I was warned about John Updike almost as soon as I became aware of him. There was David Foster Wallace, who, in a 1997 review, popularized the epithet (attributed to a female friend), ‘Just a penis with a thesaurus.’ Then there was the writer Emily Gould, who placed him among the ‘midcentury misogynists’—a pantheon that also included Roth, Mailer, and Bellow. Perhaps most memorably, there was novelist and essayist Anna Shapiro, who claimed that Updike’s novels left the female reader ‘hoping that the men in your own life weren’t, secretly, seeing you that way—as a collection of compelling sexual organs the possession of which doomed you to ridicule-worthy tastes and concerns.'”

In “Paradise Lost: On (Finally) Reading John Updike,” she views the criticism of Updike through the lens of her own cultural experience and offers her belated analysis of Couples, the first edition of which she found at a condo she rented in Florida, having “decided it was time to give the old leech a shot.”

“Beneath the antiquated details of Updike’s description, there are surely echoes of my own generation, whose mild rebellions have involved learning to make Greek yogurt from scratch and building tiny houses out of reclaimed wood. But the residents of Tarbox are also steadfast products of their time, an era wedged awkwardly between the explosion of psychoanalysis and the sexual revolution.”

O’Gieblyn concludes, “While the women in the novel are not without sexual agency, there’s an obvious power imbalance in all of this experimentation. Even when they initiate affairs, the women are never in control of them; it is the men who dictate the terms and invariably decide when and how they will end. More often than not, women are forced to use sex as a kind of currency—for revenge, for equality—and when they need furtive abortions, they are compelled to trade prurient acts for medical assistance.” But she concedes, “While the book is not exactly sympathetic to [women], the reality of these conditions is rendered with a sharp eye, through characters who are emotionally convincing. For what it’s worth, the book does not pretend that swinging—still referred to in those days as ‘wife-swapping’—benefitted all parties in equal measure.” She also notes, “Nobody can write the female body in decay quite like Updike.”

“Still, there was plenty in the book that lived up to Updike’s contemporary reputation: women who think things no woman would think. . . . .”

Ultimately, O’Gieblyn thinks that “Couples, like all great novels, can and has been read in myriad ways, but among them it might be regarded as a document of one man’s fears about the limits of his own dominion—his dawning premonition that paradise is tenuous, and his to lose.”

“The Times, in a particularly dishonest bit of sleight-of-hand, said that Updike was the lone American writer in the collection [Authors Take Sides on Vietnam] who was ‘unequivocally for’ the United States intervention in Vietnam. This was untrue; novelist James Michener, who had spent much time in Asia, was more forthright in his defense of the American presence there than Updike….”

Ironically, as Chapman notes of Updike, “Had he not been summering on Martha’s Vineyard he would have been busy, he recalled later, and probably wouldn’t have answered the query, which was designed to elicit responses that could be assembled into a book of the sort that had been put together three decades earlier from writers’ reactions to the Spanish Civil War.

“Instead, he composed a thoughtful response that considered both sides of the question; he was, he wrote, uncomfortable about what he called America’s ‘military adventure’ in South Vietnam, but he doubted that the Viet Cong, who used force to rule the peasants of the country, had a ‘moral edge’ over the United States. He said the country needed free elections, and if they chose Communism the U.S. should leave, but until that time he did ‘not see that we can abdicate our burdensome position.'”

Chapman concludes, “In the long run, the controversy didn’t hurt Updike, who was unceasingly productive to the end of his life, but in the short run it cost him. Within a few months his tenure as a writer of unsigned ‘Talk of the Town’ pieces for The New Yorker ended when his editor objected to the tone of a piece that suggested, when Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election in 1968, that the President ‘might have been right after all.’ Updike acquiesced in a suggested revision, then decided to leave the column ‘to other, more leftish hands.’

Colapinto’s novel Undone has been deemed “too tricky” because of its frank subject matter. Forty-one publishers turned it down before a small independent press in Canada decided to take a chance. And yet, as Kurutz points out, “Roth, Mailer and Updike were far more graphic in their descriptions decades ago. So why not be explicit in 2016?

“‘I can’t do it,’ Mr. Colapinto said. ‘I can’t go there. It shocks me when I see Updike do it.'”

That won’t set well with Katie Roiphe, whom Kurutz describes as having “lamented the inability of male novelists to reckon with lust in a 2009 essay in The New YorkTimes, and not much has changed in the years since. For the crew of writers that includes Dave Eggers, Benjamin Kunkel and Jonathan Safran Foer, she wrote, ‘Innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex.'”

So will we ever see another Rabbit or Portnoy? Not if 41 publishers pass on a novel that seems tame by comparison.